Tiropitas will issue warm from the ovens of bakeries and babies from their mothers’ bellies. Cats will dig in their litter boxes as if with primitive terror and addicts will curl up in the entranceways of apartment buildings, looking for a little shade. The tree outside the window that I’ve been watching for years whose branches are beginning to overtake the balcony will shine green in the sun and I still won’t know what it’s called. Someone will be rifling through the change bowl to go buy morning cigarettes and that someone will be me. In headphones paused music will wait, like Sleeping Beauty, to come to life again with a click. People will be deciding the fates of other people, and vice versa. At the corner of the street a girl will be headed toward the taxi stand, dragging a noisy suitcase far too small for her hopes, wondering whether she’ll ever see these familiar sights again, or whether her plane might drop from the sky and all will be lost. Couples will be waking up side by side, hands unconsciously cuffing half-sleeping faces, and again someone will have forgotten to buy more coffee filters. Building sites will burn in the heat, waiting for their workers like very old men with a weakness for dusty, active flesh. The music will awaken, the first tiropitas will be sold and bitten into and there will be nothing but crust and air, a little nothing. A nothing.

Karen Emmerich is a translator of Modern Greek poetry and prose. Her translations include Rien ne va plus by Margarita Karapanou, Landscape with Dog and Other Stories by Ersi Sotiropoulos (longlisted for Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award for fiction in 2009), I’d Like by Amanda Michalopoulou (longlisted for Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award for fiction in 2008), Poems (1945–1971) by Miltos Sachtouris (nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Prize in Poetry in 2006), and The Few Things I Know About Glafkos Thrassakis by Vassilis Vassilikos. She is the recipient of translation grants and awards from the NEA, PEN, and the Modern Greek Studies Association.

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Words without Borders opens doors to international exchange through translation, publication, and promotion of the best international literature. Every month we publish select prose and poetry on our site. In addition we develop print anthologies, work with educators to bring literature in translation into classrooms, host events with foreign authors, and maintain an extensive archive of global writing.